Proposal: travel policy: reject reimbursement requests submitted to accounting later than 90 days after travel.

Bradley M. Kuhn bkuhn at sfconservancy.org
Wed Jul 20 22:56:54 UTC 2016


Proposal for travel policy "90 day late" rule.  Patch is attached, and
can be found here:
 https://k.sfconservancy.org/policies/pull-request/5/_/reject-90-day

Reasoning:

I think Conservancy needs to outright reject travel reimbursement
requests after 90 days.
     
In theory, the "Board of Directors approval for 90 days late" rule was
originally instituted to make it clear that reimbursements beyond 90
days were really difficult for Conservancy to process.

In practice, the rule has meant that travelers simply believe that they
"have another out" if they are late, and late reimbursement requests put
an undue burden on Conservancy staff for special processing, and they
create extra work for our volunteer Board of Directors.
    
As such, Conservancy should simply rejects reimbursement requests that
are received 90 days or more after the last day of travel.

As a bookkeeping matter, the books are typically closed once 90 days
have passed, and this is particularly important when an audit has begun.
I've delayed the audit-prep this year in part to deal with untimely
expense reports, but it really is unreasonable for travelers to wait so
long to submit their expense reports, and it is a factor (in multiple
ways) that causes Conservancy to be behind on bookkeeping.

I admit that I once used the existing 90 day rule and got Board of
Directors approval for a late travel reimbursement, so I'm taking away
something that I've benefited from.  But I still think it's right
because I just don't think it's good policy, even if it helped me once.

Travel Policy Patch:

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-- 
Bradley M. Kuhn
President & Distinguished Technologist of Software Freedom Conservancy
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